This week I read "The Yellow World” by Albert Espinosa.
Albert had cancer from the age of 14 to 24, which forced him to spend his adolescence and part of his youth in hospital.
In the book, he shares 24 lessons that he learned in that stage of his life and that can be extrapolated to other areas of life.
Today I want to share the 5 lessons that I liked the most and that I think can be useful. Let's get to it.
Losses are positive
“Years ago when someone died, their closest relatives spent a time of mourning: they wore black, suffered and did not leave the house. Mourning was a time to think about the loss, to live the loss. We have gone from mourning to absolute nothingness. Now someone dies and at the morgue they tell you "You have to get over it". You break up with your partner and people want you to go out with someone else in two weeks. But what about mourning, where is there left to think about the loss, what the loss means?
When you lose, convince yourself that you are not losing, you are gaining the loss.
The steps are:
1. Recreate yourself in the loss, think about it.
2. Suffer with it. Invite people who have to do with that loss, ask them for advice.
3. Grieve.
4. Look for the gain from the loss and take your time.
5. In a few days you will feel better. You will notice what you have gained.”
The energies that appear within 30 minutes are the ones that solve the problem
“The formula for dealing with important news, whether good or bad.
Once you have received the message, or the email, don't open it immediately.
Wait exactly half an hour, without thinking about it, without spending a single second on it. When half an hour has passed, open the message.
That half hour is the time your body needs to calm down and your mind to calm down"
When you are sick they keep track of your life, a medical record. When you are living, you should have another. A life history.
“You may wonder if it is necessary to keep track of your life. The answer is a resounding yes.
Do you know what the point of a medical record was? Simple, to write down and record when you had a crisis, how you overcame it, when the next mishap occurred...
This is what I recommend:
1. Buy a folder that is big, almost like a box.
2. Write down every day 3 or 4 things that have made you happy. That's all, don't make a big deal out of it.
3. Write down the time, the day, the place and the reason. Does everything have to have to do with happiness? No, of course not. You can talk about nostalgia, irony... But everything has to be positive.
4. Include material. Whenever you can, take an object related to that moment. Anything will do, but don't store thousands of things, be selective.
5. Reread it, when you feel bad and also when you feel happy. At least once every 6 months, take a look at it”
Don't be afraid to be the person you have become
“Don't be discouraged by the wrong choices you make. You must trust your old self. So:
1. Analyse the decisions that you think were wrong.
2. Remember who made them. If it was you, remember that you had your reasons. Don't think you are smarter than your past self.
3. Respect them and live with them.
4. 80% of you are a consequence of your decisions, love yourself for the result of who you are. Love yourself because that is what you have become.
5. And above all, recognise that sometimes you make mistakes. And that 20% of mistakes you have to recognise and accept”
Listen to yourself being angry
"In the hospital we sometimes shouted into a tape recorder. The house officer would bring a tape recorder and we would take it in turns to vent. We would say everything that made us angry. We would shout, we would expel everything that was choking us and giving us a bad feeling.
Then the house officer would make us listen to the recording. It was always a fascinating moment: listening to you screaming, listening to you angry, you sound like a madman. Suddenly, everything that made sense to you, everything you would have defended a second before, seemed groundless. It's as if your anger dissipated with the echo of your rage”
I hope these five lessons from Albert have inspired you as much as they have inspired me, and if you haven't yet read the book, I encourage you to do so to discover more pearls of wisdom that can enrich your life.